All prizes Ukraine
Книга року BBC
Ukraine · Since 2005 · For books in Ukrainian or Russian
Awarded by BBC News Ukrainian to the best book of prose fiction in Ukrainian; this is the main prose category, not the children's or essay awards. The prize year names the December ceremony and covers books published in roughly the preceding twelve months.
BBC News Ukrainian, then the BBC Ukrainian Service, launched the prize in 2005; the first award, for 2005, was presented in February 2006, and later awards at a ceremony in Kyiv each December. Publishers submit books, a jury of critics, writers and BBC journalists draws up a long list and then a shortlist of up to five, and the winning author receives the equivalent of 1,000 pounds. Until 2017 only books written in Ukrainian were eligible; since then Ukrainian translations of books by authors from Ukraine's other language communities may also compete. A children's category was added in 2012 and an essay category in 2018. In 2014 Serhiy Zhadan's Voroshylovhrad was named Book of the Decade.
BBC Ukrainian Book 2025 · Shortlist
Bukuriia. Istoriia odnoho plavannia
Title translated by AI:“Bucuria: The Story of One Voyage”
Novel · 259 pages · War, Autofiction
AI-generated summary:A civilian surgeon becomes the chief medical officer of a battalion and calls his unit's 'ship' Bukuriia, a funny word meant to name a good feeling, as he recounts the war with black despair and black humour.
BBC Ukrainian Book 2025 · Shortlist
Kimnaty Ester
Title translated by AI:“Ester's Rooms”
Novel · 326 pages · Family
AI-generated summary:Ten-year-old Ester escapes her family's despair into imaginary Rooms where the sea spills out and balloons float across the sky, while her father, an amusement-park owner and gifted engineer, cannot stop drinking.
BBC Ukrainian Book 2025 · Shortlist
Mykoltsove shchastia
Title translated by AI:“Mykoltsio's Happiness”
Novel · Historical, Family
AI-generated summary:In a village in western Ukraine in 1939, handsome Mykoltsio dreams of wealth, respect and the status of a true farmer, just as Soviet rule, collectivisation and the underground war of the UPA are about to sweep over his life.
BBC Ukrainian Book 2025 · Shortlist
Vivtsi tsili
Title translated by AI:“The Sheep Are Safe”
Yevhenia Kuznietsova · 38 when first published
Novel · 292 pages · War, Love
AI-generated summary:In the darkest wartime winter, with power cuts and generators humming, Yana slips through a hole in a fence near the Dnipro and is drawn into dilemmas without right answers, and into an uncertain love with Maksym.
BBC Ukrainian Book 2024 · Shortlist
Kolyshnim ne chytaty, abo Yak khytra Halia perestala khvyliuvatysia i poliubyla sebe
Title translated by AI:“Not for Exes, or How Sly Halia Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love Herself”
Halyna Tarasenko · 34 when first published
Novel · 434 pages · Autofiction, Love
AI-generated summary:Sly Halia, fresh out of university, has planned years ahead with her husband and takes an IT job to save for a move to Kyiv. Then a handsome colleague who helps her with operating systems makes her wonder whether her marriage was ever real.
BBC Ukrainian Book 2024 · Shortlist
Yak yii ne liubyty
Title translated by AI:“How Could You Not Love Her”
Natalka Doliak · 57 when first published
Novel · 372 pages · War, Family
AI-generated summary:Hanna looks confident, energetic and successful, but the full-scale invasion, fear for her partner at the front, displacement, the children and quarrels with her mother are wearing her down, and she keeps replaying the past to understand why.
BBC Ukrainian Book 2024 · Shortlist
Bytys ne mozhna vidstupyty
Novel · 380 pages · War, Autofiction
AI-generated summary:A Ukrainian teacher from Kryvyi Rih, a window fitter, a gangster from Kherson, a grain-truck driver, a café owner, a writer and others who never meant to become soldiers join a separate assault battalion after the full-scale invasion.
BBC Ukrainian Book 2024 · Shortlist
Pan. Roman pro Yevhena Chykalenka
Title translated by AI:“The Gentleman: A Novel About Yevhen Chykalenko”
Stepan Protsiuk · 60 when first published
Novel · 299 pages · Historical
AI-generated summary:A novel about Yevhen Chykalenko, the landowner and patron of Ukrainian culture remembered for urging people to love Ukraine to the depths of their pockets, which sets out to show the man behind the public figure.
BBC Ukrainian Book 2023 · Shortlist
Za Perekopom ye zemlia
Title translated by AI:“There Is Land Beyond Perekop”
Anastasiia Levkova · 37 when first published
Novel · Coming of age, Historical
AI-generated summary:A girl growing up in Crimea, with a KGB grandfather and Russian blood, realises long before the annexation that she is Ukrainian, through her childhood friendship with Aliie, a Crimean Tatar girl.
BBC Ukrainian Book 2023 · Shortlist
Skorb i bezumie
Title translated by AI:“Grief and Madness”
Novel · 178 pages · War, Love
AI-generated summary:An 'anti-novel' about war, love and death: its hero is plunged into the Russian-Ukrainian war, comes face to face with death, and is forced to look at his own life again and again.
BBC Ukrainian Book 2023 · Shortlist
Tilky ne havkai
Title translated by AI:“Just Don't Bark”
Olena Zakharchenko · 47 when first published
Short stories · 108 pages · War
AI-generated summary:Stories of animals and people, from a forest doe and stray dogs to an old émigré and a young mother from Kharkiv, brought together on the morning a full-scale war begins, and of the escapes and rescues that follow.
BBC Ukrainian Book 2023 · Shortlist
Doroha na Asmaru
Title translated by AI:“The Road to Asmara”
Serhii Synhaivskyi · 59 when first published
Novel · 508 pages · War, Historical, Politics
AI-generated summary:Ethiopia, 1984 to 1986, during man-made famine and war: a young Ukrainian serving as a military interpreter with Soviet aid teams looks for the causes of the tragedy and realises he has become part of a cynical deception.
BBC Ukrainian Book 2022 · Shortlist
Villa Anemona
Title translated by AI:“Villa Anemone”
Halyna Petrosaniak · 52 when first published
Novel · 192 pages · Migration, Love
AI-generated summary:Ruta Makovii, a Ukrainian woman working in Switzerland to buy a flat for her small daughter, takes a job at a home for the elderly and finds herself an unwilling accomplice in something she considers a crime.
BBC Ukrainian Book 2022 · Shortlist
Tilky nikomu pro tse ne kazhy
Title translated by AI:“Just Don't Tell Anyone”
Irena Karpa · 42 when first published
Novel · 252 pages · Crime
AI-generated summary:Margo, a Ukrainian photographer living in Paris, starts seeing a psychologist to understand her unease, just as she becomes fascinated by news of an Avenger, a serial killer punishing rapists and corrupt officials back home.
BBC Ukrainian Book 2022 · Shortlist
Hirki apelsyny
Title translated by AI:“Bitter Oranges”
Novel · Migration
AI-generated summary:A novel in linked stories about Ukrainian women and men in Sicily, who came there to study, work and create, and whose lives intertwine as their infatuation with the island fades.
BBC Ukrainian Book 2022 · Shortlist
Feriia. 13 andaluskykh dniv i nochei
Title translated by AI:“Feria: Thirteen Andalusian Days and Nights”
Novel · 248 pages · Crime
AI-generated summary:During the feria in Seville, the secretary of the Ukrainian consulate is murdered. The only lead is Chaika, a Ukrainian migrant painter who turns out to be a former Kyiv police officer and veteran of the war in the Donbas.
BBC Ukrainian Book 2021 · Shortlist
Mahnum
Novel · 248 pages · Migration, Love
AI-generated summary:Driven partly by the war in eastern Ukraine, a young Ukrainian ends up at the western edge of Europe, in Lisbon, where he stumbles into a tragic family story that began almost half a century earlier.
BBC Ukrainian Book 2021 · Shortlist
Try lyny dlia Marii
Title translated by AI:“Three Tench for Mariia”
Serhii Osoka · 40 when first published
Short stories · 246 pages
AI-generated summary:Short stories about ordinary people whom no one would notice, each a small yet large story of a single life, drawn through sounds and smells of reeds, ponds, apples and old doors.
BBC Ukrainian Book 2021 · Shortlist
Spytaite Miiechku
Title translated by AI:“Ask Miiechka”
Yevhenia Kuznietsova · 34 when first published
Novel · 265 pages · Family
AI-generated summary:Two sisters lost in big-city life want to put everything on pause until September and return to their grandmother Teia's old house in the village of their childhood, but the summer brings people from their past, present and future to the door.
BBC Ukrainian Book 2021 · Shortlist
Радіо Ніч · Radio Nich
Yuri Andrukhovych · 61 when first published
Novel · 448 pages · Politics, Love
AI-generated summary:After another failed revolution, Josyp Rotskyi, the musician who became a hero of the barricades, has to flee. Hunted by the regime's secret services, he finally broadcasts a night radio show from what may be his last hiding place.
BBC Ukrainian Book 2020 · Shortlist
Ya bachu, vas tsikavyt pitma
Title translated by AI:“I See You Are Interested in the Dark”
Illarion Pavliuk · 40 when first published
Novel · 662 pages · Crime
AI-generated summary:Kyiv criminal psychologist Andrii Haister is sent as a consultant to the remote village of Buskiv Sad, where a little girl has vanished on a winter night and a serial killer the locals prefer not to notice is at large.
BBC Ukrainian Book 2020 · Shortlist
Bukova zemlia
Title translated by AI:“Beech Land”
Maria Matios · 60 when first published
Novel · 926 pages · Historical, Family
AI-generated summary:A saga spanning 225 years, told through the intersecting histories of five families of different social standing and of historical figures connected with Bukovyna.
BBC Ukrainian Book 2020 · Shortlist
Port Zhytana
Title translated by AI:“Port Gitane”
Oles Ilchenko · 63 when first published
Novel · 255 pages · Historical, Migration
AI-generated summary:A small restaurant on Lake Geneva links Marko Mazur, a Ukrainian émigré painter famous in interwar Paris, and Serhii Kovalenko, an art historian collecting for a Kyiv oligarch who tries to solve the mystery of Mazur's disappearance.
BBC Ukrainian Book 2020 · Shortlist
Amadoka
Sofia Andrukhovych · 38 when first published
Novel · 829 pages · Historical, War, Love
AI-generated summary:A man disfigured beyond recognition in the war in eastern Ukraine survives with no memory of his name, his origins or anyone close to him. A woman finds him and tries, with love and patience, to stitch his past back together.
BBC Ukrainian Book 2019 · Shortlist
Raion «D»
Title translated by AI:“District D”
Artem Chekh · 34 when first published
Short stories · 317 pages · Autofiction
AI-generated summary:Linked stories that build a self-critical portrait of the author and a group portrait of the residents of one district of Cherkasy, as they try to live through the sudden passage from late Soviet to newly independent Ukraine.
BBC Ukrainian Book 2019 · Shortlist
Tanets nedoumka
Title translated by AI:“The Dance of the Half-Wit”
Illarion Pavliuk · 39 when first published
Novel · 679 pages · Speculative
AI-generated summary:Gil, a space biologist with many military operations behind him, is out of work and money, his marriage is failing and a deadly hereditary illness may be about to surface, when he is offered a place on a scientific expedition to a distant planet.
BBC Ukrainian Book 2019 · Shortlist
Po toi bik sontsia
Title translated by AI:“On the Other Side of the Sun”
Kseniia Fuks · 31 when first published
Novel · 222 pages · Autofiction
AI-generated summary:Brought to the edge by sadness, misunderstanding and loneliness, a young woman ends up in the closed ward of a psychiatric hospital, where she begins her own fight to find hope, joy and herself again.
BBC Ukrainian Book 2019 · Shortlist
Klavka
Maryna Hrymych · 58 when first published
Novel · 333 pages · Historical, Politics
AI-generated summary:Kyiv, 1947: at the Writers' Union of Ukraine, during the notorious campaign against Ukrainian literature, writers who are colleagues and neighbours are set against one another through their own ambitions.
BBC Ukrainian Book 2018 · Shortlist
Серые пчелы · Serye pchely
Andrey Kurkov · 57 when first published
Novel · 298 pages · War
AI-generated summary:Only two people remain in a village in the grey zone of the Donbas war: the beekeeper Serhii Serhiiovych and his old classmate and opposite, Pashka. When spring comes, Serhiiovych sets out to take his six hives somewhere free of shooting.
BBC Ukrainian Book 2018 · Shortlist
Troiandy za koliuchkoiu. Spovid pro zhinochu tiurmu
Title translated by AI:“Roses Behind the Barbed Wire: A Confession About a Women's Prison”
Novel · 238 pages · Autofiction
AI-generated summary:Drawing on her own experience, the author writes about women in prison, a subject treated as forbidden and shameful, and about how society brands every woman who has been behind the wire.
BBC Ukrainian Book 2018 · Shortlist
De nemaie Boha
Title translated by AI:“Where There Is No God”
Max Kidruk · 34 when first published
Novel · 476 pages
AI-generated summary:Strangers with very different lives, among them a desperate Ukrainian woman carrying a large sum of money and a Russian pilot fighting a fear of flying, share flight 341, which leads them into the greatest ordeal of their lives.
BBC Ukrainian Book 2018 · Shortlist
Liudy v hnizdakh
Title translated by AI:“People in Nests”
Oleh Kotsarev · 36 when first published
Novel · 226 pages · Family, Historical
AI-generated summary:A family's history told through the stories every family passes down and the ones that fade into old photographs, retold with light humour, parody and deconstruction.
BBC Ukrainian Book 2017 · Shortlist
Shengenskaia istoriia
Title translated by AI:“A Schengen Story”
Andrey Kurkov · 55 when first published
Novel · 715 pages · Migration
AI-generated summary:At midnight on 21 December 2007, as Lithuania joins the Schengen area, three young couples gather at a farmstead to celebrate and share their plans to move to London, Paris and Italy, trusting that Europe will not let them down.
BBC Ukrainian Book 2017 · Shortlist
Kharkiv. 1938
Oleksandr Irvanets · 56 when first published
Novel · 223 pages · Speculative, Satire, Politics
AI-generated summary:An alternative history in which the Ukrainian People's Republic survived: poets, politicians, nationalists, spies and terrorists converge on Kharkiv, the Ukrainian capital, for a literary carnival in 1938.
BBC Ukrainian Book 2017 · Shortlist
Інтернат · Internat
Serhiy Zhadan · 43 when first published
Novel · 336 pages · War
AI-generated summary:Donbas, January 2015. Pasha, a schoolteacher who has tried to stay out of the war, watches the front line creep towards his home, and is forced to cross it and then find his way back.
BBC Ukrainian Book 2017 · Shortlist
Tanzher
Title translated by AI:“Tangier”
Novel · 252 pages · Love
AI-generated summary:A stranger offers Orest, a young bohemian from Odesa, a part in an experimental film. Instead of launching a career, the offer pulls him into strange relationships in which the film's characters, their prototypes and the actors become entwined.
BBC Ukrainian Book 2016 · Shortlist
Zabud-richka
Title translated by AI:“The River of Forgetting”
Dmytro Kapranov, Vitalii Kapranov · Dmytro Kapranov 49, Vitalii Kapranov 49 when first published
Novel · 541 pages · Historical, War, Love
AI-generated summary:Three young men are drawn into the Second World War under one and the same name, Stepan Shahuta. Decades later, two of their descendants meet, fall in love and begin tracing how those three lives became tangled.
BBC Ukrainian Book 2016 · Shortlist
Zazyrny u moi sny
Title translated by AI:“Look into My Dreams”
Max Kidruk · 32 when first published
Novel · 521 pages · Speculative, Family
AI-generated summary:Two-year-old Theo's heart stops for thirty-six seconds during a routine operation. Two years later his father, Myron Belinskyi, realises that something came back with the boy, and travels to America, where new technology can look inside a sleeping mind.
BBC Ukrainian Book 2016 · Shortlist
Babornia
Myroslav Laiuk · 26 when first published
Novel · 300 pages · Family
AI-generated summary:Mariia Vasylivna, a 71-year-old biology teacher, takes stock of her life and holds on to the great love it once held, until she finds a false bottom in the wardrobe of her late husband, a lieutenant colonel.
BBC Ukrainian Book 2016 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Masha, or Postfascism”
Yaroslav Melnyk · 54 when first published
Novel · 248 pages · Speculative, Politics, Love
AI-generated summary:In the fourth millennium, a journalist at the newspaper Voice of the Reich falls in love with a female stor, one of the beings with human bodies who are not counted as human, and starts fighting for their right to be called people.
BBC Ukrainian Book 2015 · Shortlist
Карбід · Karbid
Andriy Lyubka · 28 when first published
Novel · 250 pages · Satire, Politics
AI-generated summary:In the invented town of Vedmediv on the Transcarpathian border, history teacher Tys hatches a plan to dig a tunnel to Hungary so that every Ukrainian can reach Europe, and recruits the local smugglers to help.
BBC Ukrainian Book 2015 · Shortlist
Ponaikhaly
Title translated by AI:“Incomers”
Artem Chapeye · 34 when first published
Novel · 237 pages · Migration, Family · Білий Сад, book 1
AI-generated summary:Serhii Tkachuk fights illegal migrants at home while his parents work abroad; over more than a decade the novel follows the four Tkachuks of the invented town of Bilyi Sad as the father's mistakes pull the family apart.
BBC Ukrainian Book 2015 · Shortlist
Poroslyi kulbabamy dvoryk
Title translated by AI:“A Courtyard Overgrown with Dandelions”
Valeriy Shevchuk · 76 when first published
Short stories · 271 pages
AI-generated summary:Two volumes of previously unpublished novellas and stories written between 1960 and 2006, illustrated with photographs and documents from the author's family archive.
BBC Ukrainian Book 2015 · Shortlist
Aptekar
Title translated by AI:“The Apothecary”
Yuri Vynnychuk · 63 when first published
Novel · 443 pages · Historical, Love
AI-generated summary:Between 1646 and 1648, first in the Venetian Republic and then in Lviv, historical figures and invented ones meet in a mystery of love triangles in which the real and the imagined blur.
BBC Ukrainian Book 2014 · Shortlist
Povnyi misiats
Title translated by AI:“Full Moon”
Andriy Kokotiukha · 44 when first published
Novel · Historical, Crime, War
AI-generated summary:Podillia, autumn 1944: in the village of Satanov fear of the NKVD has replaced fear of the Gestapo, gangs roam the woods, and bodies mauled by beasts keep turning up, until a front-line officer sets out to unmask the werewolf.
BBC Ukrainian Book 2014 · Shortlist
Chervona zona
Title translated by AI:“Red Zone”
Artem Chapeye · 33 when first published
Novel · 304 pages · Speculative, Politics
AI-generated summary:In a near-future Kyiv split into safe, wealthy green zones and poor, unprotected red ones, young journalist Anton Tsyperdiuk commits a crime by accident and has to flee into the red zone he knows only from the media.
BBC Ukrainian Book 2014 · Shortlist
Месопотамія · Mesopotamiia
Serhiy Zhadan · 40 when first published
Short stories · 328 pages · Love
AI-generated summary:Nine stories and thirty poems about the same circle of people in a city between two rivers, Babylonian tales of love and death, street fights and daily passions, betrayals, escapes and returns.
BBC Ukrainian Book 2014 · Shortlist
Chomu ya ne vtomliuiusia zhyty
Title translated by AI:“Why I Don't Get Tired of Living”
Yaroslav Melnyk · 55 when first published
Short stories · 203 pages · Speculative
AI-generated summary:Stories and novellas with startling premises: a man lives life after life in new young bodies, a scientist destroys the world in order to meet God, and a TV reporter turns into a character in a writer's book.
BBC Ukrainian Book 2013 · Shortlist
Frau Miuller ne nalashtovana platyty bilshe
Title translated by AI:“Frau Müller Is Not Willing to Pay Any More”
Natalka Sniadanko · 40 when first published
Novel · 302 pages · Migration, Love
AI-generated summary:Khrystyna and Solomiia set out together for Berlin in search of happiness; now one of them lies dead on the cobbles, and a short crime report prompts a look back at what drove her to it.
BBC Ukrainian Book 2013 · Shortlist
Za chvert desiata
Title translated by AI:“A Quarter to Ten”
Yuriy Makarov · 58 when first published
Novel · 237 pages · Love, Speculative
AI-generated summary:A lonely, widowed university teacher of foreign languages finds that his idle curses come true with uncanny literalness, and that gift, along with an affair with a young student, makes him take stock of a life lived mostly under Soviet rule.
BBC Ukrainian Book 2012 · Shortlist
Chervonyi
Title translated by AI:“The Red”
Andriy Kokotiukha · 42 when first published
Novel · 315 pages · Historical, War
AI-generated summary:The life of Danylo Chervonyi, a legendary Ukrainian Insurgent Army commander in Volhynia, is told by people on the other side: a Soviet militiaman, a disgraced officer in the Gulag camp where Chervonyi keeps order, and a present-day man reading his uncle's notebooks.
BBC Ukrainian Book 2012 · Shortlist
Istorii pro troiandy, doshch i sil
Title translated by AI:“Stories about Roses, Rain and Salt”
Dzvinka Matiyash · 34 when first published
Short stories · 202 pages
AI-generated summary:Forty-five short stories in three parts, about roses, rain and salt: people of different times, among them a stammering monk, a girl who cuts birds out of paper and a woman baking her husband's favourite pie.
BBC Ukrainian Book 2012 · Shortlist
Біографія випадкового чуда · Biohrafiia vypadkovoho chuda
Tanja Maljartschuk · 29 when first published
Novel · 246 pages · Coming of age
AI-generated summary:Lena, a girl from a small Ukrainian town who has looked for a miracle since kindergarten, grows up to defend stray dogs and disabled people, while wondering who the woman in a headscarf is who drops from the sky to save the helpless.
BBC Ukrainian Book 2012 · Shortlist
Telefonui meni, hovory zi mnoiu
Title translated by AI:“Call Me, Talk to Me”
Yaroslav Melnyk · 53 when first published
Short stories · 223 pages · Speculative
AI-generated summary:Stories, novellas and a short novel in which everyday reality slips: rooms vanish one by one from a gentleman's house, lists of death dates can be bought, and a son talks to his father on the phone for years without managing to visit.
BBC Ukrainian Book 2011 · Shortlist
Narysy bursy
Title translated by AI:“Sketches of the Bursa”
Anton Sanchenko · 45 when first published
Short stories · 223 pages
AI-generated summary:Funny, colourful tales of the Soviet-era nautical school of the fishing industry in Kherson: how future sailors studied, went absent without leave, fell in love and made friends.
BBC Ukrainian Book 2011 · Shortlist
Podorozh iz Mamaiotoiu v poshukakh Ukrainy
Title translated by AI:“A Journey with Mamaiota in Search of Ukraine”
Artem Chapeye · 30 when first published
Nonfiction · 271 pages
AI-generated summary:Back home from America, the author crosses Ukraine from west to east on a Japanese motorcycle he calls Mamaiota, in a travel diary of the people he meets in search of the country.
BBC Ukrainian Book 2011 · Shortlist
Bora
Halyna Vdovychenko · 52 when first published
Novel · 238 pages
BBC Ukrainian Book 2011 · Shortlist
Khronos
Taras Antypovych · 33 when first published
Novel · 197 pages · Speculative, Politics
AI-generated summary:In 2040 scientists in Ukraine learn to manipulate biological time, making people young or old in an instant, and time becomes something to steal, sell, hoard and kill for.
BBC Ukrainian Book 2010 · Shortlist
Drozofila nad tomom Kanta
Title translated by AI:“A Fruit Fly over a Volume of Kant”
Anatoliy Dnistrovyi · 36 when first published
Novel · 146 pages
AI-generated summary:A young Kyiv humanities scholar of the late 1990s drifts between love affairs and academic routine, unhappy and unsure what to live for, confessing only to one woman.
BBC Ukrainian Book 2010 · Shortlist
Музей покинутих секретів · Muzei pokynutykh sekretiv
Oksana Zabuzhko · 49 when first published
Novel · 727 pages · Historical, Family, War
AI-generated summary:Spanning three generations from the autumn of 1943 to the spring of 2004, a novel links the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, Stalin's era, the dissidents of the 1960s and the 1990s through family secrets buried in the ground.
BBC Ukrainian Book 2010 · Shortlist
Stolittia Yakova
Title translated by AI:“Jacob's Century”
Volodymyr Lys · 60 when first published
Novel · 240 pages · Historical, Family, War
AI-generated summary:Yakiv, a Polissia peasant who has lived under five states, waits in his old house in Volhynia for his hundredth birthday, for a letter from Olenka, the drug addict he once saved, and for a visit from his son.
BBC Ukrainian Book 2010 · Shortlist
Hrushi v tisti
Title translated by AI:“Pears in Pastry”
Yuri Vynnychuk · 58 when first published
Novel · 288 pages · Autofiction
AI-generated summary:In autobiographical tales of his youth, a writer recalls Soviet-era Lviv: poetry and black-market deals, café gatherings and pranks, the army and love.
BBC Ukrainian Book 2009 · Shortlist
Urizka hotyka
Title translated by AI:“Urizh Gothic”
Halyna Pahutiak · 51 when first published
Novel · 352 pages · Historical, Family
AI-generated summary:In late-19th-century Galicia the peasant Petro Bezub'iak, who has lost his wife and small daughter, guards his son Orest from their kin in nearby Nahuievychi, where villagers once burned his grandfather as a vampire during cholera.
BBC Ukrainian Book 2009 · Shortlist
Misto z khymeramy
Title translated by AI:“The City with Chimeras”
Oles Ilchenko · 52 when first published
Novel · 160 pages · Historical, Crime
AI-generated summary:Two present-day teenagers in Kyiv try to decode the secrets of the architect Władysław Horodecki, builder of the House with Chimeras, while a parallel line follows Horodecki himself in the early twentieth century.
BBC Ukrainian Book 2009 · Shortlist
Dzhury-kharakternyky
Title translated by AI:“The Sorcerer Squires”
Volodymyr Rutkivsky · 72 when first published
Novel · 448 pages · Historical, War · Джури, book 2
AI-generated summary:In the days of the first Cossacks, young Hrytsyk, the little magus Sanko and the elusive Cossack Shvaika with his loyal wolf take on the Tatar horde, though there is hardly anyone behind them.
BBC Ukrainian Book 2009 · Shortlist
Lehendy Lvova. Knyha druha
Title translated by AI:“Legends of Lviv. Book Two”
Yuri Vynnychuk · 57 when first published
Short stories · 430 pages · Легенди Львова, book 2
AI-generated summary:Legends of old Lviv retold from the city's folklore, where spirits, devils and witches mix with kings, burgomasters, sorcerers and city rogues.
BBC Ukrainian Book 2008 · Shortlist
Sarabanda bandy Sary
Title translated by AI:“The Sarabande of Sara's Band”
Larysa Denysenko · 35 when first published
Novel · 240 pages · Love, Satire
AI-generated summary:Pavlo, a journalist and whale lover left by his wife, prizes solitude and cannot stand children, pets or guests, until he falls for his old classmate Sara and, while she is away, her loud and unruly relatives move into his life.
BBC Ukrainian Book 2008 · Shortlist
Niamlyk i balakucha kvitochka
Title translated by AI:“Nyamlyk and the Talkative Little Flower”
Lesia Voronyna · 53 when first published
Short stories · 136 pages
AI-generated summary:Olianka and her friend Butsyk, one of the tiny nyamlyks who live in the wall of her house and love semolina, have new adventures: a festival of the Great Spoon, a plumber's ghost, real pirates and a talkative little flower.
BBC Ukrainian Book 2008 · Shortlist
Москалиця · Moskalytsia
Maria Matios · 49 when first published
Novella · 108 pages
AI-generated summary:A woman in mortal danger finds no fear strong enough to break her will to resist, and keeps her secret all her life as she keeps her honour.
BBC Ukrainian Book 2008 · Shortlist
Shakhmaty dlia dybiliv
Title translated by AI:“Chess for Morons”
Mykhailo Brynykh · 34 when first published
Novel · 142 pages
AI-generated summary:The boy Misha and his mentor, Doctor Padliuccio, set out on the long road to the "chess Grail", until chess becomes a battlefield where far more is at stake than a game.
BBC Ukrainian Book 2007 · Shortlist
Trokhy pitmy
Title translated by AI:“A Little Darkness”
Lyubko Deresh · 23 when first published
Novel · 286 pages
AI-generated summary:At a summer gathering of punks, hippies and other drop-outs on a remote Carpathian meadow, six troubled people, among them a punk alchemist haunted by an old wound, accept a dubious offer of shamanic healing while someone plans a mass suicide.
BBC Ukrainian Book 2007 · Shortlist
Майже ніколи не навпаки · Maizhe nikoly ne navpaky
Maria Matios · 48 when first published
Novel · 154 pages · Family, Historical
AI-generated summary:A family saga in three linked novellas follows the Hutsul families Chev'iuk, Keivan and Varvarchuk from Austria-Hungary and the First World War to the mid-twentieth century, beginning with a man who marries for money instead of love.
BBC Ukrainian Book 2007 · Shortlist
BZhD
Title translated by AI:“Life Safety”
Sashko Ushkalov · 24 when first published
Novel · 240 pages · Coming of age
AI-generated summary:Baz works at a newspaper, shares a flat that strangers may break into at any moment, takes a girl to spend the night on a rooftop, and still cannot pass his exam in Life Safety, which for him is simply life.
BBC Ukrainian Book 2007 · Shortlist
Somha
Title translated by AI:“Salmon”
Sofia Andrukhovych · 25 when first published
Novel · 352 pages
AI-generated summary:A narrator tries to assemble a person out of countless pieces, from events, memories, wounds, slights and traumas, laying bare an unvarnished life in what reads like an imagined session of psychotherapy.
BBC Ukrainian Book 2006 · Shortlist
Tantsi v maskakh
Title translated by AI:“Dances in Masks”
Larysa Denysenko · 33 when first published
Novel
AI-generated summary:Mei Kim, a teacher of Korean in Seoul, starts secretly following a mysterious European woman, who turns out to be Nelli, a Ukrainian who long ago surrendered to circumstance and lost her true self.
BBC Ukrainian Book 2006 · Shortlist
Namir!
Title translated by AI:“Intention!”
Lyubko Deresh · 22 when first published
Novel · 296 pages · Coming of age, Speculative
AI-generated summary:Petryk Piatochkin, an ordinary schoolboy from Midni Buky, has a phenomenal memory that slowly changes his mind, will and imagination, until he wants to push past the limits of perception and of so-called reality.
BBC Ukrainian Book 2006 · Shortlist
Kvitoslava
Otar Dovzhenko · 25 when first published
Short stories · 211 pages
BBC Ukrainian Book 2006 · Shortlist
Zghory vnyz
Title translated by AI:“From the Top Down”
Tanja Maljartschuk · 23 when first published
Novella · 220 pages
AI-generated summary:A nameless woman flees city life for a remote house in the Carpathian mountains, hoping for solitude and an end to her fears, and is drawn into a world of local myths, secrets and surreal events.
BBC Ukrainian Book 2005 · Shortlist
Vin: rankovyi prybyralnyk. Vona: Shosti dveri
Title translated by AI:“He: The Morning Cleaner. She: The Sixth Door”
Iren Rozdobudko · 43 when first published
Novel · Migration, Love
AI-generated summary:In the first of two paired novels, a Ukrainian working as a morning cleaner in a hotel on Malta finds his favourite book in a guest's room and sets out to find the woman it belongs to.
BBC Ukrainian Book 2005 · Shortlist
Froid by plakav
Title translated by AI:“Freud Would Cry”
Irena Karpa · 24 when first published
Novel · 238 pages · Love
AI-generated summary:A restless journey from Paris and Frankfurt through Java, Bali, India, Nepal and Bhutan and back to Kyiv, between campsites and luxury hotels, a Swedish lover out to improve the world and a Russian one with a heap of problems.
BBC Ukrainian Book 2005 · Shortlist
Druha sproba
Title translated by AI:“Second Attempt”
Oksana Zabuzhko · 45 when first published
Poetry · 318 pages
BBC Ukrainian Book 2005 · Shortlist
Z tsoho mozhna zrobyty kilka opovidan
Title translated by AI:“Several Stories Could Be Made of This”
Taras Prokhasko · 37 when first published
Short stories · 128 pages